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lua-l archive |
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| Subject: | Heritage of Lua syntax for multi-line strings and comments |
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| Date: | Thu, 23 Nov 2023 23:52:17 +0100 |
| From: | Claudio Grondi <claudio.grondi@freenet.de> |
| To: | Lua mailing list <lua-l@lists.lua.org> |
In order to colorize my life while writing code I am using the
Lua feature of providing different kind of strings and use the
code highlighting in the text editor to show them in different
text colors and styles.
I am putting this "styling info", a kind of markdown, after the
line length limit column in order to separate the main text and
the styling information.
What I am wondering about is if there is a good eason I am not
aware of for using:
`--[===[ third level
styled text comment ]===]`
instead of:
`--[[[[[ third level
styled text comment ]]]]]`
or
`--['''[ third level
styled text comment ]''']`
or
`--[...[ third level
styled text comment ]...]`
Why does it matter for me? It does matter because I decided to
leave the path of in my eyes ugly and overlong monospaced texts
with spaces to embrace variable width fonts and tabs which allow
me to put more textual information within same space on the
display:
`--[===[ third level styled text
comment ]===]`
`--[[[[[ third level styled text comment ]]]]]`
`--[...[ third level styled text comment ]...]`
`--['''[ third level styled text
comment ]''']` (in my eMail client the shortest one)
The shortest and probably most appropriate and least obtrusive
text pattern in this context seems to be given using single
quotes. And while I am in the process of writing a kind of
transpiler to be able to experiment with another patterns for
marking starts and ends of strings/comments I would like to know
what could be the reason for the choice of such and not other
pattern in Lua.
What I am currently considering as most concise way of defining
strings and comments is usage of a double quote as begin and a
single quote as end of a string, increasing the amount of single
quotes for higher levels:
"''' multiline string 3rd level
" string ' -" comment '
"' multiline first level
string ' -"' multiline
first
level comment'
''' -"''' multiline
3rd level
comment'''
Please don't consider this posting as a feature request or
critics ... I am just only curious about the heritage of the Lua
syntax choices. Maybe I am not aware of something thinking a
transpiler to Lua from the targeted syntax would be a matter of
very simple regular expressions based text replacements.
Another approach with easier parsing and no need for any
escaping would be to move the entire actual script code, except
comments and content of strings fully outside of the ASCII range
... this would make the transpiler even easier to write by just
replacing patterns of higher range Unicode with the related
ASCII pattern without the need for regular expressions.
Claudio